Amazon Web Services offers AWS WAF (web application firewall) to protect web applications from malicious behavior that might impede the applications functioning and performance, with customizable rules to prevent known harmful behaviors and an API for creating and deploying web security rules.
$0.60
per 1 million requests
Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud is a unified platform of cloud-native services designed to help enterprises regain control over their IT environments. Powered by an intelligent, programmable global cloud network, it is built to offer security, performance, visibility, and reliability.
AWS WAF is highly appropriate to interrupt or prevent cyber attacks because when implementing rules, whether they are specific or centralized, so any application that has these vulnerabilities is protected.
Implementing managed rules creates greater security to protect both API and applications. If implemented along with other AWS tools, the security is much better, so if you want to protect applications against more specific attacks, it is ideal to integrate with Amazon CloudFront, which is a great benefit because it warns when thresholds are exceeded or specific attacks occur. AWS WAF is ideal to avoid common web attacks. For more specific attacks and scenarios, I don't recommend this.
Cloudflare works well as security measure that gives peace of mind without needing to work too hard to get it functioning well. It provides great tools to customize the security experience as well. This is all the same for the caching tools as well. They have a lot of built in tools that make using the caching easy right out of the box, but they provide the customization options to get things just right for your site.
AWS WAF has the most developer-friendly API to create firewall rules.
AWS WAF provides OWASP security controls, which reduces developers' burden (i.e., SQL injection and cross-site scripting).
AWS WAF has customizable web security rules. The user can even push the rules through the API available, which is the great feature and helped me a lot.
It protects applications at layer 7 (HTTP) of the OSI model and not just layer 4 (TCP).
Registrar and DNS services are impeccable, with registrations done at cost and without ADs. DNS services setting standards for speed of resolution.
DDOS protection. With their content distribution network to back them they have the bandwidth and tools to be both proactive and reactive to bad actors.
WAF - Their Web Application Firewall helps mitigate common site vulnerabilities and has active zero-day protection running for breaking exploits
In some cases, using Cloudflare can actually lead to slower website speeds if the network is congested or if the website's traffic is particularly heavy.
Some website owners may find that the level of customization offered by Cloudflare is limited, especially in comparison to other solutions.
While Cloudflare is easy to set up and manage, it may be too complex for users who are not familiar with web technologies.
We have been using AWS WAF for the past 3 years in front of our websites. We find it useful in preventing data crawling, DDOS attacks, etc on our websites, and hence we are going to use it in the future as well. AWS WAF is one of the best Firewalls in business.
The product is highly scalable. It is easy to configure the rules and thereby helps us to mitigate many vulnerabilities. The interface and programming of the firewall provisions were easy to setup. Amazon clearly spent a lot of time figuring this out and perfecting it. It allows users to do customized configurations based on their needs. It provides protection against a number of security issues like XSS, SQL injection, etc. I would definitely recommend this for protecting your infra as you scale, since this basically protects and filters all requests hitting your application server.
Everything is extremely concise and all settings apply immediately and take effect globally. There is no reason to explicitly plan/think in terms of individual regions as one would have to traditional cloud offerings (AWS, OCI, Azure). All Cloudflare products integrate seamless as part of a single pipeline that executes from request to response.
If you're intending to use AWS WAF, I would say that you absolutely should sign up for support. AWS Support is excellent and they can help you in a really good way to solve your issues.
I have only used their support a few times, and most times, they are responsive and able to resolve my issue with a minimal amount of time and effort. However, there was one instance where I simply asked about how to purchase some more resources (redirect rules), and I received some type of automated/AI response that was very unhelpful and gave me no opportunity to escalate to a person.
Easy of use. Setup and configuration is fairly quick. There are the usual advantages of it being a cloud solution where you can buy into the solution, configure it and set it up and get it up and running. If you are already a subscriber to AWS, having a native service has its advantages.
Nothing like it. Organizations can utilize these Cloudflare products to enhance their online presence by improving security, performance, reliability, and developer efficiency. Cloudflare is an American company that delivers services such as DNS, a content delivery network (CDN), and various other additional services to make websites faster and more secure. Cloudflare is used by over 26 million sites, resulting in the processing of more than 1 billion IP addresses each day.
We have seen reduced usage and downtimes after using Cloudflare for Caching. This has already yielded ROI as minimal downtime ensures consistent user traffic and increases revenue.
It can handle significant traffic spikes and shields the website from DDOS attacks. We have prevented a number of DDOS attacks after using Cloudflare and hence we are already seeing an ROI by using it.
Some of the integrations with Cloudflare are really painful and we have faced a lot of issues because of not having native integrations to certain 3rd party apps.
